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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

And why those countries tend to have barely any growth in their economies (i.e. europe).

The economy is supposed to serve us, not the other way, there is no pride in being a slave, it's not the flex you think it is lol.

Let's work 90 hours a week and retire at 80, imagine the growth, big numbers get bigger makes bald monkey happy

> Let's work 90 hours a week and retire at 80, imagine the growth, big numbers get bigger makes bald monkey happy

that is all you heard in the 80-90s, people over the pond showing off how many hours per week they worked. like... how is that something to be proud of? So wauw, you spend 12hrs+ per day working , had no free evenings, zero paid holidays. And that is supposed to impress who?

please.

What happened in the 80s too is that politics told us automation would bring a 3 days work week, which never materialized. But now we have to trust the same people, moved by the same greed, that this time it'll be different

40 years on, how many of them truly are the same people?

It's the same breed of people, bred from the same system, not literally the same people but the people following on the footsteps. Greed is the constant.

Hell, it has been going much longer than only 40 years ago, on "In Praise of Idleness" Bertrand Russell talked about how industrialisation with its automation should be helping workers to work less 90 years ago.

They're cloning them in the same schools, that's why we have 30 years old full blown boomers

It is ok, I earn enough to pay my bills, the ones from my family, a bit of travelling around and healthcare.

Usually over here we don't dream of making it big with big villas and a Ferrari on the garage, we work to live, not live to work.

France and UK are in giant fiscal crises. The German economy is in the toilet with no hope in sight. All of them have seen large deterioration of the quality of health care in the last decade. The EU leaders care more about Ukraine and destroying all privacy than any economic reform.

The irony of promoting performance tracking at employee level and criticizing the EU for destroying privacy

How are those tarifs working out?

I am european lol.

US GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was 0.1% when you take out NVIDIA and OpenAI sending the same $100 billion back and forth to each other

Which seems to be a great thing for liveability and happiness metrics across the board.

Not when your economy is reduced to mass importing of third world labor to keep salaries down and your economy going (i.e. Italy, France, UK and Germany).

As if it is not happening in usa.

Korea has strong worker protections and unions. Not on tracking, but in general.

Low union membership though.

Which may be related to unions having been actively persecuted (to the extend of actual state-sanctioned torture, disappearences, and bona-fide massacres against people involved with unions - and people living next door. With active support of US civilian and military leadership, that is).

Google Gwangju.

No? Unless you don't count intra-company worker committees. Those fulfill much of the same role and are mandatory above a (relatively low) company size.

You do realize that a lot of people in EU are working 4 days a week? Are you aware that McDonalds employee can live by having only one job?

EU decided to distribute the productivity benefits instead of hoarding it into stock market gains like US does.

Btw, you do realize that US commodified investing in Us stocks? Whole world can easily invest in US stock market. Basically, instead of taking care of their own citizens, US economy is paying out gains to foreigners.

and as we all know, economic growth is the only good thing in life

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